The Waiting Room (6 page)

T
he “gap” which remained between them (as between doctor and patient, husband and wife, lover and mistress) made her cry on awaking upon the knife-edge of illusion, anaesthesia, solid bliss. She was blind. Yet she could see “his” lips move to address the apple of his eye. Eyeball of curious wood painted green stars and red. She
remembered
how he had fiercely cut and chiselled … their
Universe
…. Globe….
She
flung
it
at
him
now
across
the
room.
Violent storm.
He
was
on
the
point
of
leaving
her.
Was it ten years or twenty ago? Sunset. Blood. Green and red.

“Why don’t you leave me and go?” she cried. “You’ve done your worst. Now you stand there like a dolt … idiot. Dress it up as you like: the truth is—you revolve this way and that … vacillate. Always on the move. Why can’t you make up your mind whether you want to stay or go? I know what I want: security, marriage, a home. Not just roaming like your pupil to the ends of the earth. No use, I tell you. Can’t live like that any more. Can’t you see what you’re doing to me? For the last time: make up your mind….”

Susan was overwhelmed by her own outcry. It had been a brutal year for her. Still she was mad to speak like that. And in fact it sounded incredibly strange in her own ears after all this time (moments or years?) as if it had never occurred save as a dream centuries old. The last straw…. And when she realized he had indeed taken her at her word and gone, she felt she had died in truth within “his” operating theatre—blown to bits, sky-high. The end of the world. The shattering of the globe they once
possessed
. Why had she—without thinking—flung it at him? All because of one fantastic theory of freedom which he spouted at her until it triggered off an accumulative
burden
… resentment … pride. Ironic feud. One always read too much into everything at a particular moment. For what remained after each explosion of habit or
circumstance
was never an identical character within the present and past.

Was it ten years or twenty ago one relationship had died and another begun? In our end is our beginning.
Phenomenon
of nature. She flung the last burning straw at him out of the declining sun—bonfire of memory. It
illuminated
shred and circumstance—his departure all over again. He appeared once more to seize the glistening dying fury of recollection within her like a ball in space (though how could she swear it was truly so?): in that instant of recall her eyes splintered. Spiritual horizon. Shower of sparks.
OPERATION SUCCESSFUL
.
Theatre
of
darkness.
Black.
His face grew
BLACK
but not with clinical rage (as she had dreamt) but with irony and submission … irony of fate … submission…. One must not read too much into the night of things. She rounded upon him like all the midnight paradoxical furies of old: there was nothing she wanted to save to clasp him gently to her breast. Let him stay in spite of the bitterness and freedom of option she thrust at him. The truth was she wanted him to
stay;
not go. She wanted to bind him to her in spite of anything spoken to the contrary. How could he take her literally at her word? How could he dare to
involve
her (and dissolve all her craft of subtle persuasion) in one action of destiny—ultimatum of choice, motive sphere, dialectic of the vortex?

She cried to him of an essential treaty of sensibility they shared he could never break however far he professed he was at liberty to go. And yet in abandoning her was he not
acting
to fulfil the range and depth of both precipitate choice and agreement? Was he not freeing her—as well as himself—from the burden of hidden motive (one thing openly said, another secretly meant), with each step he took which made her see the necessary life of the soul within the material cult of dismissive opinion? She was blind, but she saw this collective treaty of feud for the first unravelling time of stars upon an eyeball of wood:
sensitive
borderline of a fetish they shared in which every dumb particle of conviction, splintered statement and motive, combined into deed and sphere. She had actually cried to him—stay or go. And he chose to go.
But
she
secretly
intended
him
to
stay.
No wonder she saw him still in the light of one she had not truly relinquished,
quicksilver
of obsession, barometer residing within her. Upon which she rode—as upon his pointer or scale—since she knew, or felt she knew, that he—in spite of his open
dismissal
of her—secretly desired her to leave all and follow him. Broken and cemented journey around the globe. Northern Lights. Shield of the sun.
Holes
for
eyes.
Through which they broke into Orinoco. Their first journey together long ago.

Now
—after twenty years—was it still too late to recover an essential trace of their last—as if she had indeed
overtaken
him in the end—hypothesis and realm, river of gold? Fantasy of Eldorado?

He beckoned to her—frozen sea—wave and boulder. The strands of her life spun toward him—one form or another, conception or deformity of conception.
Inventory
of concrete and mystical instruments. Pursuer and pursued. Elusive pregnant model. Half-human,
half-brute
. Half-skin, half-wood. Half-song, half-silence.
ENDLESS CREW OF FATE
.

It was as if he had partly escaped her within ears that were deaf to her plea, and she was on the point of
regaining
him within eyes that were blind to her peril—sleep of the sun.

T
he sun appeared in the sky overhead. Then writhed, flashed, vanished across the minute clearing he possessed in the astronomical, glittering and cruel wealth of the jungle.

It may never have stood above him after all and the very clearing around and beneath him turned unreal as though its very
isolation
made it enormous and the
immensity
of space and bush surrounding it shrank into a
uniform
indistinct province.

He was waiting for his Amerindian guides to return and
she
(Susan) was turning into one of these. Skin of metamorphosis. She often felt his eyes upon her back but she knew herself masked by an ornamental stillness and indifference, catlike, slumbrous, smooth as stone….

He looked up suddenly and there she was—naked (his eyes knew) beneath the cloth she wore, bereaved and entrenched, alone.

She had come to sleep with him—both abstractly and intimately.
To
make
herself
known.
Casual and reflective, yet deadly shadow upon his heart and lips. He could hardly believe his ears and eyes which may well and truly have been blotted out at this moment; and he knew he needed, as a consequence, to be on his guard as never before against the unreality and conquest of space.

The camp he possessed in the tiny clearing stood very close to a nameless creek which he had followed once for miles until the hills closed in all around and the water descended into a hole in the ground, to emerge a mile or two away upon the face of a cliff. The great casual
boulders
at the mouth of the cavern and within the
subterranean
gallery of the creek may, for all he knew, have been flung into position by some ancient explosion of the sun—they seemed to him so utterly remote from the very earth on which they stood.

He, too, and
she,
at this moment, as they faced each other, might have been equally alien sculptures of
affection
. He was suddenly filled with an obscure motive but fearful determination which drew him closer still to her.

He recalled how secretively she used to move within her small body of Indian companions and how his
impulses
of recognition—as if she had belonged to him within another frame and place and circumstance—faded time after time into nothingness with each step he made. He excused himself now for every inroad of imagination he visualized upon her, with the reflection that it was all in the involuntary nature of fantasy. She was woman and he was man, situated in bewildering circumstances of
unpredictable
light or shade bordering upon the density of the remainder of the world.
Fantasy
indeed.
How could he dream of such a thing. And in the presence of her
husband
, then still at her side. She had not yet suffered bereavement. Four guides in all: herself, her husband, another man, his wife.

It had been his expressed intention at the outset to employ only two—both men—but the women arrived before long. He greeted them with anger and
consternation
but secretly was glad they had come. It was good for the morale of the men to have their women with them. And in fact he was quick to point out that they possessed no alternative now but to remain with the party and go on. Far into the interior droghing their rations on their back which they supplemented with fish and game.

FURTHER ENTRY
illustrated
by
long
jagged
line
 
(
written
in
strange
hand
though
this
may
have
been
due
to
violent
emotional
stress
).

 

AUTHOR’S NOTE
: The above entries with others
pertaining
to come from “his” diary were pasted into the log-book as if to confirm a shadow of participation and identity involving all the “characters” of the log-book—a shattered witness of events running like a species of remarkable fiction.

*

LIKE A FLASH THE BUSH MASTER ROSE AND STRUCK
. Out of the blue. Stood high on its tail, writhed, spat. And it was Amerindian Susan’s husband upon whom sprang the mark of the venomous fangs, holes in his skin….

HORROR
. Stupefaction. Intimate course of the poison in his veins.
The
tooth
of
the
cayman
alligator
was
placed
on
the
wound.
Nothing prevailed—neither civilization’s first aid chest nor mesmeric tooth of the wild, remnant of the skull….
THE MAN DIED
.

It had happened at very close quarters—as close as
she
(
Susan
)
now stood to him whom, she believed, in her primitive reckoning—since he happened to be their
employer
, living employer of consciousness—to be obscurely responsible for the fate of each member of his party (and therefore the death of her husband). Dream and capacity.
WAITING ROOM.

All at once “he” could hardly believe his ears and eyes as if these had truly returned to him out of the cavern of death—to guard her equally in himself. As if he—and not his Amerindian servant and guide—had suffered the fangs of the snake. He recalled now the lightning stroke of the bushmaster which seemed to marry the sun as it earlier stood poised and still racing, fiery luminous ball, glowing feast of eyes upon the crumb of place. A great burning tooth was administered to the holes in “his” skin—puncture of memory—and converted and swallowed by a pinprick of blood. Poison as well as antidote.

He saw her now in a light he had never seen, since he had not been thus healed and safeguarded before. Her hair, black and glinting, piled high like a coil of dreams where the head of the snaking sun had been fierce and wild. Her eyes, black as a pit. He recalled the flight of the stream where it fell like a beam of light from the torch of sun. Self-division of elements he began to witness on his voyage in pursuit of the nameless river of the world where it descended into the ground at his feet to where he visualized its emergence—crack of illumination—upon cliff or stone. Two indistinct points these were (when seen from the middle obscure distance of the cavern). The glare of the torch in his hand blew out as if a cloud had sealed entrance and exit and shattered every skylight and clearing. But the faint stunned eyes within the
subterranean
cave of Susan grew brighter still, stars of
consciousness
blown by the very fist of night.

He had been walking upon a skeleton framework on the bank of the stream but now descended into the water and made his way forward within the very body of the current. The hidden river was suddenly colder than he imagined it could be at the heart of the tropics. The seal of the sun was upheld and splintered again and again—idiosyncratic purity and flaw of the landscape like an explosion of memory, jungle of nights, inset of days. The black eyelid of nature flickered with each stroke of
enlightenment
, stamp of flame, ice….

*

It was a journey which he felt had begun in the very obscurity of ages, as if at one time fire had sealed the cavern—at another time ice. And these seals were the peculiar stamp of insulation from total disaster upon a living crew of fate who were deprived of the extremity of experiencing the very function of death they
performed
. Cloud or seal, blocking of ears, blinding of sight which rendered one and all immune and faithful guides or servants of each other through the unenviable passage of the underworld. Vessel of reality. Bond of translation.

Each relic “he” touched—antique skull, tooth, fluid object—was instinct with paradox; chafe of fury on one hand and insensible freedom of proportion or function on the other.

Each constellation of properties he visualized—
sacrificial
litter, dog or snake, ancient, newborn—was both “alive” and “dead” within the crucial operations of the nameless cavern, middle way, middle passage—
astronomical
man and slave, doctor and patient, lover and mistress, captain and instrument, artist and model. And the ghostly sun which now seemed to glare at him existed both within its own naked right, indescribable, pure, and in another sacred anthropomorphic skin, masthead and shroud of reality. Furnace of blindness as well as blackness of vision. Bound to the stars as well as indestructibly alien—free from total ordeal and attraction within an operative seal and design. Unendurable canvas of fire save for each insulation portrait. Multiple impress and circuit of compassion within the transit of the “living” and the “dead”.

The
subterranean
cave
of
Susan.
It was as if he had spoken her name aloud and the echoes combined into a crumbling fixture, property of the imagination. There was no price he would not pay to grasp such an ultimate seal of
freedom
and conviction within the borderline capacities of nature.

The cavern shook once again and rumbled—not with the same echoes this time but with a new distant faint blast. Incredible … surprise … revelation. He
knew
(as surely as if he had been told) that the blast he now heard had actually occurred ages ago: and that, at long last, it was able to reach him in an echo long muffled and
nurtured
and preserved (like the sound of the sea in a shell) by its very sovereign stamp of irruption—
persona
of “
deafness
” to the original catastrophe and, in fact, “blindness” (until a moment ago) to the ancient shroud of the sun. Shroud of love. Ancient metamorphosis, endless creation, gods, species of fiction within whose mask of death one endured the essential phenomenon of crisis and translation.

Delayed
blast.
Short
circuit.
Reaction.
Within the radius of which “he” felt himself begin to relive—with new awareness—his descent through the door of the middle passage (down the nameless river of the underworld) as one who had been smitten by the bushmaster of space until “he” and “it” fell through a common skin into a naked darkness they had never dreamt would heal and safeguard them.

There swam before him ghost and bride, armature of love, explosive anatomy he cherished at the end of ages of pursuit within the delayed recognitions of the present in the past, the past in the future….